Fabien Potencier has continued his post series covering the next major release of the Symfony framework, Symfony 4. In this latest post he walks you through a quick demonstration of the creation of a new Symfony 4 application including a simple administration system.

Time to test Symfony 4... or at least let's test the experience of developing Symfony 4 projects with Symfony 3.3. Keep in mind that all the tools are in preview mode. Features might evolve over time. I'm waiting for your feedback! The first stable version of Symfony Flex will not be released before Symfony 4 at the end of November 2017. It gives the community plenty of time to discuss the changes I have described in this series of blog posts.

He then walks through the process for creating the application:

• Using Composer's "create-project" to make a new skeleton application
• Setting it up as a git repository
• Defining environment variables
• Registering the framework bundle
• Installing the command line tools

With the basic application set up he then shows how to install the EasyAdminBundle to create the simple administrative interface. He's also created a screencast showing this same process so you can see it all in action.

On the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorc has posted a tutorial helping you get up and running with PHP 7 and Phalcon in five minutes on a Homestead Improved virtual machine.

You may remember our past infatuation with Phalcon, the fastest PHP framework.

In this post, we’ll go through the process of getting it up and running in 5 minutes on one of our <a href="http://www.sitepoint.com/quick-tip-get-homestead-vagrant-vm-running/>Homestead Improved instances. If you’re not interested in why or what Phalcon is, just skip ahead to “Setting it up”.

He starts with a brief recap of what the Phalcon framework is (including Zephir), some history behind it and the latest advancement around the framework: LTS support for v3.0. The tutorial then gets into the setup and configuration of the VM along with PHP 7 and the latest stable version of Phalcon. He then uses the sample application provided by Phalcon and getting it boostrapped and running.

The Symfony blog has a post that talks about the state of the Symfony "Demo" application three months after its release. The "Demo" application is a simpler way to get an entire Symfony 2 application up and running, giving you a good foundation for either your own development or quick testing.

The [Symfony Demo application](https://github.com/symfony/symfony-demo) was publicly introduced three months ago. In addition to being a learning resource, it's considered the reference implementation of the [Symfony Best Practices](http://symfony.com/doc/current/best_practices/index.html). During the past weeks, we've been busy adding new features to showcase Symfony functionalities. This article is a quick recap of the most important new features.

They talk about four different improvements to the demo setup and configuration process:

• Full internationalization
• New console commands
• New technical requirements checker
• New JavaScript and Sass/CSS management

They also briefly mention a few other miscellaneous changes at the end of the application around security, debugging helpers and more functional testing.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new article posted with some first impressions of the Nette framework, a larger but not often talked about PHP framework that showed up in their framework survey results in third place.

SitePoint’s PHP channel conducted its annual survey on the most popular framework of 2015 and the results were discussed here. We saw some familiar names: Laravel, Symfony2, Phalcon, Silex, Slim, etc. But wait, what is this: Nette? According to the survey result, it ranked number 3 in both “at Work” and “in Personal Projects”, just tailing the two giants: Laravel and Symfony2.

I had never heard of this framework before the survey results got published. A framework so popular is worth looking into. Thus, in this article, we will take a look at Nette, see what it can do and discuss some of the features.

The Nette framework is a "set of decoupled and reusable PHP components" that combine into a complete framework (including templating, error tracing and unit testing integration). He follows along with their Getting Started guide and helps you get a demo application copy up and running (via Composer). He then goes through the project structure, the "Adminer" tool, route handling, controllers/actions and the "Latte" templating engine. He also covers basic security functionality and some other interesting features like the "Tracy" debugger and the use of the integrated unit test functionality.

The ServerGrove blog has a new post today introducing the new Symfony Installer, a tool that can make getting started with a Symfony2 application quick and easy.

Yesterday, the Symfony team introduced the new Symfony installer. Its main goal is to help developers to create Symfony projects faster. Until now, installing Symfony to start a new project required a few steps. [...] The installer tries to do this in one step. It downloads a compressed file with all the code, including the vendors directory, so you don’t need anything else to run Symfony for the first time.

The post shows you how to install the installer via a curl call to fetch the executable. They show how to use it to create a new project, making a demo project and the resulting application and web interface for the demo. They also mention some of the future work that's planned for the installer including HTTPS support and caching improvements. The post finishes up with a quick mention of the code "under the hood" using the Symfony console component.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post from Lukas White that gets into the details of combining SOLR searching with Solarium to perform geospatial queries.

In a recent series of articles I looked in detail at Apache’s SOLR and Solarium. To recap; SOLR is a search service with a raft of features – such as faceted search and result highlighting – which runs as a web service. Solarium is a PHP library which allows you to integrate with SOLR – whether local or remote – interacting with it as if it were a native component of your application. If you’re unfamiliar with either, then my series is over here, and I’d urge you to take a look. In this article, I’m going to look at another part of SOLR which warrants its own discussion; Geospatial search.

He uses a simple example, locating airports near a given location, to give a more "real world" idea of how it all works. He starts by introducing the concept of geospatial searching and the idea of "points" as they relate to a specific location. He then gets into the actual setup of the application, including the SOLR schema configuration and making the queries on the data. The Solarium library allows for simple location queries when given just the "latlong" helper type and the location/distance to use for the starting point. He uses the data from the OpenFlights service to gather the airport data and creates a search form and basic list output of the results from searches on it. If you'd like to see the end result in action, check out this demo website.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted the second part of their series about using the CoinBase API through PHP. In this new tutorial they use the API connection made in the first part via the Coinbase SDK.

In part 1, we covered basic installation and usage of Coinbase’s Bitcoin PHP API and the accompanying SDK. In this second and final part, we’ll be building our sample application.

He briefly shows how to send and receive bitcoins before diving into the application. His simple application includes a basic welcome page, a payment page, thanks page and a cancel page (in case of errors). Complete code for the HTML, CSS, and PHP (API calls) is included in the post. He shows how to create the button to start the payment process and add it to the page.

The Qandidate blog has a new post today that "pulls back the curtain" as to how they manage their development process and get their work done.

At Qandidate.com we tried a lot of different project management tools and techniques. After two years of experimenting I want to share our current process, seen from my role as product owner (PO). One reason for sharing this, is to help you improve your process, but the most important reason is to start a discussion with you based on your experience, to improve our process even more. Our main rule at Qandidate.com is to embrace change. Always be open for changes that may or may not improve your process. If a change improves the process it’s a win. If you didn’t try it you will never know!

They walk through the three main points over the overall flow of work there:

• The process itself including two week sprints containing (unestimated) stories
• A demo and stakeholders meeting showing the work they've done during the sprint and get feedback from the stakeholders
• The stories and how they're created and when/how new ones are added (their "piano meetings").

They also include testing, both frontend and backend, and focus on small chunks of functionality instead of quick and dirty hacks. While their process won't work for every group (and is more of a "scrum-but..." setup) it is interesting to see how another group does their work.

On the Qandidate.com blog there's a new post looking at fault tolerant programming in PHP, a follow up to their previous post introducing the topic and creating a "circuit breaker" to prevent major issues when a problem pops up.

Now we will show you a running demo of the application where the circuit breaker library Phystrix is combined with asynchronous programming. The advantage of this approach is that it allows the querying of multiple backend services asynchronously. A timeout can be set for each of the calls and the circuit breaker will deal with failing services.

A screencast included in the post shows a script in action and how it reacts when the various services it needs fail. They've posted the code for the demo can be found over on GitHub and full instructions to run it are included in the post. Also included is some of the output from the test and a peek inside the logs showing where things were broken and if they were able to recover.

If you're relatively new to using the Symfony2 framework, you might be wondering about some of the things happening during requests to your application. One of these things is the routing and handling of each request. In this new post from NetTuts.com they introduce you to the foundations of Symfony2 routing in a screencast.

In the last video, I said we'd take a look at controllers next, but I actually feel it may be easier to learn the framework in a slightly different order. Instead, we're going to learn about the basics of Symfony 2 routing, to give our applications clean and pretty URLs and make it easy to manage our applications URLs and links. We're not going to get too detailed, as Symfony's routing can do quite a bit, but we'll at least cover what we need to know by keeping it straight and to the point.

The screencast is a bit less than 10 minutes long and provides an overview of the routing, how it interacts with bundles and controllers. There's also a bit about using annotations to help define routing information directly in the controller.